Category: Direct Mail

After many years of providing advertising options for the real estate industry I’ve found that the most successful real estate pros are those who consistently promote their business with advertising.

Of course, this is true of most business. The ultimate goal would be a business that profitably exists with nothing but word of mouth promotion.

But in real estate the reality is that most people seldom buy and sell a home and a thoughtful real estate professional knows they need constant exposure to the market to find new prospects to grow their business and reinforce to the community that they are actively “in business”.

There are many cost effective places to advertise – online, in print, on billboards, on your car, on neighborhood signs. But, effective advertising is really a matter of reaching active real estate prospects as directly as possible and then connecting with them via a phone call, open house visit, e-mail or website visit.

I believe it’s more important than ever to measure your results and weigh the return on your advertising investment. My company provides ways to measure advertising response in all our print and online options. You should expect nothing less from any place you advertise.

But for serious Realtors, not advertising is not an option.

Here are some questions to ask about your advertising:

Do you advertise consistently?

Do you get visitors to your website and do they contact you? What is the quality of that lead?

Do prospects call you from your advertising? Do you get seller AND buyer leads?

Do you have a verifiable way to measure response from your advertising?

How do you promote your services to sellers? To buyers?

For print advertising – is it verifiable, well designed and well written with balance between self-promotion and listing promotion?

Does your other marketing support and relate to your advertising? Like direct mail (personal letters and post cards) and online social media that connects with past clients.

Do you use billboards or bench ads? Do they produce leads for you?

Does all your marketing and advertising promote a link to your useful website? Can you verify that your advertising is leading to website visits?

You might have seen Google's TV ad during the Super Bowl (yea Saints!). With record viewership of 106 million people, I believe that was money well spent to get the word out about their main product – the helpfulness of computer search.

I found this article (download below) in my files. I've had it for some time – it's on writing thank you notes. If you're not regularly sending handwritten notes on real paper - via the U.S. Postal Service with a stamp – I think you're missing an opportunity.

Most of my correspondence is via e-mail. And most of my mail is bills or catalogs. Stand out by sending a hand written note – so rare these days.